We All Looked Up (4 page)

“That's some crazy-ass shit,” Bleeder said.

Andy looked up. The star was bright blue, like the center of the flame off a chemistry-class Bunsen burner.

“What is it?” he asked. “Like, a comet?”

“It's probably a satellite,” Bleeder said.

Jess shook his head. “Satellites move.”

“Not always.”

The door of the club opened, disgorging a wave of beer smell and feedback. Andy noticed her even before he recognized her—Eliza Olivi, on the arm of some blond dude with a ridiculous Afro. He was way older than her, and totally shitfaced.

“Eliza!”

“Hey, Andy.”

She seemed eager to get away, but when he pointed out the icy blue star, she stared at it for a long time. Then she walked off without even saying good-bye.

“You're so into that,” Bobo said.

“Shut up.”

“Come on, it's inevitable. You're the biggest virgin at Hamilton, and she's the biggest slut. You're just working the odds.”

“Dude!”

It was a stupid point, anyway. Of course he had a thing for Eliza. Everybody did. The only difference was that he'd liked her from the beginning, back when she was just a quiet presence in the back row of classrooms. But everything changed after she hooked up with ­Misery's older brother, the basketball player. Story was they'd been having sex in the photo studio for, like, six months before his girlfriend caught on. Andy had always figured the rumors about Eliza's promiscuity were mostly made up, but then what was she doing going off with some rando from the Crocodile on a weeknight?

Sometimes Andy wondered if he understood anything about anyone. Like, he'd thought his parents were totally fine right up until the moment they split. And though he still saw Bobo as a kind of brother, stuff between them had been totally fucked up since Andy had “broken the pact” last year. They never talked about it, but it hung over them like one of those sky-wide Seattle clouds that just drizzled down on you for days and days. Only in this case, it wasn't rain that Andy had to put up with, but a constant stream of insults, dead legs, and general disdain.

“Mary,” Bobo said, snapping his fingers. “You're thinking pretty hard over there. Should I call an ambulance?”

Andy breathed out a stream of smoke and tried to release all his anxiety along with it. So what if Bobo was still pissed off at him? So what if Suzie O thought he was a dick? So what if Eliza was giving it up to some loser with an Afro when Andy probably wouldn't get laid until he was thirty? None of it really mattered. Today was just another shit day in a life that sometimes felt like a factory specializing in the construction of shit days.

“Life sucks,” Andy said. A cliché, sure, but that didn't make it any less true.

Bobo nodded. “Blame it on the blue star,” he said, purposely misquoting Radiohead.

Andy figured it was as good a scapegoat as any. He raised his ­middle finger toward the sky.

“Fuck you, star.”

A
nita

IT WAS A BOLD PLAN.
even as Anita passed old Steve at the Broadmoor gatehouse, she hadn't decided if she would really go through with it. She clicked a button on the Escalade's sun visor to open the private gate that led to her house. The driveway was long and straight, lined on either side with oak trees. They'd recently been pollarded, which made their upper halves look grotesque—the arboreal equivalent of the Venus de Milo, with dozens of severed limbs instead of just two.
Better be careful
, they seemed to say,
or you'll end up like us
.

Anita shut the front door behind her. The housekeeper, Luisa, was ferrying a huge pile of linens toward the laundry room.

“
Hola
, Anita.”

“Hey, Luisa.”

“¡En español!”
Luisa insisted.

Anita was studying Spanish at Hamilton, and Luisa occasionally gave her lessons on the subtle mysteries of the subjunctive mood, the differences between
ser
and
estar
, and, when no one else was around, a smattering of never-to-be-repeated slang terms “straight from the streets of Bogotá.”

“Hola, Luisa.
¿Cómo estás?”

“Not so bad. I am going to clean out the guesthouse now your grandparents are gone back to Los Angeles. Not that there's much to do. They are so clean!”

“Yo sé
.”

“My grandparents are coming like a hurricane,” Luisa said. “But yours, I am hardly telling that they are there.”

“
Si. Son locos
.”

“
Están
locos
.”

“Right.
Lo siento
, Luisa, but I'm a little distracted. Have you seen my father?”

“
En la oficina
.”

“
Gracias
.”

Her father's office had all the warmth of a refrigerator. Basically, he'd built a corporate boardroom in his house, complete with a wide glass desk and an expensive space-age chair behind it. A dozen metal filing cabinets topped with gray plastic binders were lined up against the walls. The only object in the room with any life in it (both literally and figuratively) was a large dome-top cage of stainless steel. Inside, Bernoulli, the world's saddest hyacinth macaw, jumped from perch to perch, squawking and pooping and gazing longingly (or so it looked to Anita) out the window.

When she came into the office, her father was reading that weird pink newspaper that only people whose lives revolved around money bothered with. She thought it was funny that a paper like that would be pink, of all colors. Better khaki, or plaid, or whatever color a good power tie was. Seeing her father reading from those pink pages made her think of Barbie dolls and Hello Kitty backpacks and Claire's. Of course, she kept this observation to herself.

“You're back early,” he said, folding the paper up and placing it on his desk.

“Student council. There isn't much on the agenda this time of year.”

“I'm sure you could've found something to work on, if you'd really applied yourself. Hamilton is hardly perfect.”

Funny, it was just one more droplet of negativity in the vast ocean of criticism she'd been drowning in since birth, but it was one droplet too many. Suzie O was right: Something had to change.

“I got a C,” she blurted out. Then, watching the anger rush into her father's face like an invading army, she hastened to explain. “It was just one calculus test, so my overall grade will still be fine as long as I keep everything else up. Even Mrs. Barinoff said it was a rare misstep. That's what she called it: ‘a rare misstep.'”

When her father finally spoke, he had the quiet gravitas of a faraway mushroom cloud. “Anita, do you understand what a conditional acceptance is?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand that if your grade point average drops, Princeton could retract your offer?”

“It was just one test.”

“If it can happen once, it can happen again.”

“Well, the world wouldn't end if I didn't go to Princeton,” Anita said, and cringed inwardly in preparation.

Her father stood up. He wasn't a particularly tall man, but when he got this worked up, he looked like a giant. “Young lady, we made our decision as a family, and every time you question that decision—”

“I'm not—” she tried to say.

“
Every time
you question that decision, it shows a lack of respect for everything this family has done for you. Everything we've sacrificed so that you could be in the position to attend a good university. Are you really that ungrateful? Do you really have that little respect for the investments we've made in your future?”

That was the funny thing about her father. He made investments for a living, and somewhere along the line, he'd started to mistake his daughter for just one more of them. And how did an investment work? You put some money in up front, and then, somewhere down the line, you expected a return. Hence the SAT tutors and the weekly reading assignments and the Saturday-morning French classes. Hence the curfews and the lectures and the “dictionary dinners” (during which Anita's father asked her to reel off the definitions of obscure words while her food got cold). In fact, the only reason Anita had attended Hamilton High in the first place was because the admissions adviser her father had hired insisted she'd have a better chance of being accepted at Princeton if she graduated from a public school. Every single thing Anita did had to be about the bottom line: jacking up the return on her father's investment. Only it wasn't more money he wanted. It was success. It was prestige. It was a good little black girl with an Ivy League degree and a serious career—doctor, politician, entrepreneur.

Well, maybe I don't want any of those jobs
, Anita wanted to scream.
Maybe I don't think I should have to do whatever you say just because I live under your roof!

Most people her age were already engaged in the difficult task of transforming the parent-child relationship, of turning a strict ­dictatorship into something more like a democracy. But Anita still couldn't help but see her father as a kind of god. A petty, arbitrary god, but a god nonetheless. And on any other day, if she'd had to stand there, listening patiently while a god called her a disappointment and a disgrace and a delinquent, she would have been in tears. But not today. Today, Anita was strong. Today, Anita was composed. Because today, Anita was lying. She'd never gotten a C in her life.

It had been Suzie O's idea. Anita had gone to see her because she'd felt herself teetering on the brink of a mental breakdown. The past three years had been one oasis-less desert of excruciating effort. Anita had hoped it would all end when she got into Princeton, but it hadn't. If anything, expectations had only risen to keep pace with her newly enhanced prospects. It was as if someone had challenged her to hold her breath underwater for as long as she could, and when she finally broke all the world records and started swimming back up to claim her trophy, she discovered that the surface had frozen over.

“Maybe you need to disappoint him,” Suzie had said.

“What do you mean? Like, flunk something?”

“You don't even have to do it. You could just pretend.”

“What for?”

“Because then you'll see that the world doesn't end if your dad doesn't approve of something. And maybe he'll see that too.”

“He won't, though. I know he won't.” The tears had come before she could remember to hold them back. And then that slacker kid, Andy Rowen, had caught her in the act. He'd looked so surprised, like he never would have guessed that she was capable of normal human emotions.

“Whatever it is, it's not worth it,” he'd said.

Wise words, in spite of the source. They were what gave her courage now, to walk out of her father's office right in the middle of his denunciation.

“Young lady?” he called out after her. “Young lady, where are you going?”

She escaped to her bedroom and stood very still, waiting for her father to chase her down and continue to berate her. But he didn't come; the only explanation was that he was paralyzed with shock. Anita closed and locked the door, then took Amy Winehouse's
Back to Black
off the shelf. It was her secret de-stressing ritual—switch on the turntable, turn up the volume as loud as it would go without bleeding downstairs, and, finally, shut herself in the closet.

She didn't do it to be alone, though it was nice to be alone. And she didn't do it because the closet was dark and warm and cozy, though it was all of those things. She did it because the closet was the only place—in the entire world, it sometimes felt—where she could sing without being overheard.

Since the age of eight, Anita had dreamed of being a singer. And ever since her parents had discovered that dream, they'd been hell-bent on thwarting it. There had been piano lessons, but only until Anita's teacher made the mistake of allowing an Alicia Keys song into the repertoire. Within a week, the piano in the sitting room had been replaced with a solid oak table, and Anita was taking ballet. In middle school, chorus had been mandatory, but somehow there was always an important family event scheduled for concert nights, so the choir director never gave Anita any solos. As a freshman at Hamilton, she'd tried out for the school musical—
Into the Woods
—and had been cast as the Witch. But when her father found out, two weeks into rehearsals, he marched into the school and took the director aside, explaining that they had a strict rule in their house—curriculars before extracurriculars. The part ended up going to a skinny white girl named Natalie.

Anita's father knew he couldn't afford to give her so much as an inch, because music ran in the Graves bloodline. Anita's uncle, Bobby, was a professional saxophonist, touring the country with whatever band would have him. He had no roots, no family—no investments at all. Benjamin Graves would have set fire to every jazz club in ­Seattle before he'd let his daughter end up like that.

But no one could stop her from singing in the closet. In the closet, there was no distinction between dreams and reality, no need to choose one path or another. There was just the heavenly lift of the strings, the sharp shriek of the horns, the twinkle of the guitar, Amy Winehouse's iniquitous voice blasting its way across the divide between life and death to duet with Anita's. And high school and college and the ponderous, bloated look on her father's face all faded away. She sang through the whole record—every verse, every chorus, every bridge—high as a heroin addict until the last note warbled and died.

Whatever it is, it's not worth it.

Anita felt something strange overtaking her, a sense of self-­determination that had been swelling ever since Andy made that offhand comment outside Suzie's office. It was a bit like how she felt on those nights when there was a full moon and suddenly she was manic or depressed or pissed off and there was just no other explanation for it but the stars. Before she could second-guess herself, she slipped back downstairs, past her father's office, past Luisa and her mother and the smell of roast chicken, out the front door, and into her car. Her father hadn't
technically
grounded her, but that would be scant defense when she got home.

She drove slowly past Swedish hospital and down into the city, windows open even though it meant drops of rain prickling her arm. Esperanza Spalding was playing all this week at Jazz Alley, and Anita was going to go see her. Anita knew about Esperanza from YouTube. She'd been a musical prodigy, teaching at the Berklee College of Music by the age of twenty. Now she was a star.

The crowd at Jazz Alley was older, mostly in their forties and fifties. Anita took a seat at a small round table and ordered a Shirley Temple.

She'd hoped that watching Esperanza perform would fill her heart with resolve and inspiration, but as the show went on, she only got more and more depressed. Here was this ridiculously talented artist living her life as loud as a bullhorn. And here was Anita, watching from the darkness, destined for an insignificant and utterly silent existence. At the beginning of application season, Anita had suggested she might apply to a couple of music schools alongside all the Ivy League universities her father was so excited about. The resultant tantrum had been so huge that Luisa later swore she'd picked up the phone and dialed the first two-thirds of 9-1-1.

When Anita got out of the club, she realized she hadn't looked at her phone in hours. Sure enough, there were two dozen missed calls and almost as many messages, all from
HOME
. She listened to one, but stopped it after the first few furious words and cleared her in-box with a tap.

It was a weeknight, so there weren't many people out on the streets. Anita wandered down toward the water, into the heart of homeless Seattle. Cardboard boxes and sleeping bags. Unkempt hair and ­hollow faces and clothes the color of pigeon wings. From under the bench of a bus stop, a white fragment of eye followed her across First Avenue. She went all the way down to the wrought-iron fence, bent into curlicues and spirals, beyond which Puget Sound sparkled blackly, and grabbed hold of the smooth metal bars. She lifted herself off the ground, imagined rising up and up and over the topmost prong and out into the water.

“Hey, sister.”

She turned around, for some reason expecting to find a friend. But the man standing behind her was a stranger, tall and black, with a long scar snaking across the bottom half of his face.

“Hey,” she said.

“You looking for someone?”

“No.”

“You shouldn't be alone out here this time of night. It's not safe.”